Marjoleine Sloos

Own Variety Bias.

In a language identification task, native Belgian French and native Swiss French speakers identified French from France as their own variety. However, Canadian French was not subject to this bias. Canadian and French listeners didn’t claim a different variety as their own.

Bias in Auditory Perception

Our brain accomplishes the remarkable feat of processing a continuous stream of incoming sensory information at an astonishing speed. This is possible through simultaneous bottom-up processing of the incoming stimuli and top-down processing of prior knowledge (Kinchla & Wolfe, 1979). Categorization facilitates recognition and also anticipation of the incoming stimuli (also known as predictive coding, e.g., Rao & Ballard, 1999). Therefore, the presentation of written words facilitates the auditory perception of distorted pronunciation (Sohoglu, Peelle, Carlyon, & Davis, 2012). The skill to correctly categorize depends on relevant experience and memory that has been built over time. Perception thus involves a balance between the sensory stimuli and the stored representations in memory. If a category or a mental image is inaccurately matched with the incoming stimuli, biased perception emerges (see examples later). Bias in perception occurs mostly unconsciously and perhaps incessantly—after all, stimuli are unlikely to form a perfect match with stored memory.